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Performance Management (PM) processes have become a potent part of strategic and service quality decisions in healthcare organisations. In 2005, the management of public healthcare in Ireland was amalgamated into a single integrated management body, named the Health Service Executive (HSE). Since then, the HSE has come up with a range of strategies for healthcare developments and reforms, and has developed a PM system as part of its strategic planning. The purpose of this paper is to review the application of PM in the Irish Healthcare system, with a particular focus on Irish Hospitals and Emergency Services.

An extensive review of relevant HSE’s publications from 2005 to 2013 is conducted. Studies of the relevant literature related to the application of PM and of international best practices in healthcare performance systems are also presented.

PM and performance measurement systems used by the HSE include many performance reports designed to monitor performance trends and strategic goals. Issues in the current PM system include inconsistency of measures and performance reporting, unclear strategy alignment, and deficiencies in reporting (e.g. feedback and corrective actions). Furthermore, PM processes have not been linked adequately into Irish public hospitals’ management systems.

The HSE delivers several services such as mental health, social inclusion, etc. This study focuses on the HSE’s PM framework, with a particular interest in acute hospitals and emergency services.

This is the first comprehensive review of Irish healthcare PM since the introduction of the HSE. A critical analysis of the HSE reports identifies the shortcomings in its current PM system.

Purpose – To identify the key success factors in a change process and to demonstrate how adherence to the phases of large-scale change contributed to the successful reform of the Irish cancer services and is critical to the sustainability of this large-scale change.

Design – In-depth retrospective analytical case study drawing from face- to-face semi-structured interviews with key stakeholders and players.

Findings – The Irish health care reform had been continually thwarted by local politics. The Irish government confronted this trend by bringing in an outside expert to head the cancer services reform project who, with government support, managed both clinician and public resistance and, based on the evidence of international best practice, led the reform. Sustainable change was achieved by attention to how large-scale change works. The leadership of the project is an important element in overcoming the path dependency that is dogged in most health care reforms.

Value – This chapter provides evidence that the four key phases of large system change: understanding the need for change, framing the change, undertaking the change and sustaining the change, coupled with key success factors in relation to timing, financial viability, political will and leadership, public support, well-managed process, and technical infrastructure and capacity are critical to the implementation and sustainability of large-scale change.

The purpose of this paper is to explain the path that the Irish health system has taken towards achieving good clinical governance, exploring the historical influences on its’ development, some of the major initiatives that have been implemented and the obstacles that have been encountered.

The paper draws on the author's experience researching and teaching in health systems and healthcare management.

The paper offers some explanations for why earlier attempts failed to change the system as well as why recent attempts have met with more success. Greater efforts need to be made to progress clinical governance in the primary care services. In addition it is argued that there is a need to institute systems that enable learning form errors, to involve the public and patient groups and to invest in research that enables answers to the how and why questions that are so often neglected in the reform process.

The paper discusses clinical governance in the Irish Health system and identifies some of the challenges yet to be addressed, many of which are common to clinical governance efforts in other jurisdictions.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the health‐states of unit under test (UUT) in aerospace systems by means of unreliable test outcomes, and the evaluation results can provide a guide for engineers to carry out proper maintenance prior to total failure.

In this paper, the authors formulate the health‐state evaluation (HSE) problem with unreliable test outcomes based on Bayes rule, and develop the Lagrangian relaxation and adaptive genetic algorithm (LRAGA) to solve it. The solution scheme can be viewed as a two‐level coordinated solution framework for the HSE problem. At the top level, the Lagrange multipliers are updated by using AGA. At the bottom level, each of the sub‐problems is solved by using AGA.

The experimental results show that the HSE model appears promising and the LRAGA can obtain the higher quality solution and converge to it at a faster rate than conventional methods (i.e. Lagrangian relaxation (LR), genetic algorithm (GA), simulated annealing (SA) and Lagrangian relaxation and genetic algorithm (LRGA).

The proposed method for the HSE problem of large‐scale systems which include thousands of faults and tests needs to be verified further.

The HSE results for aerospace systems can help engineers to carry out a schedule for prompt maintenance prior to UUTs' failure, to avoid the consequences of total failure. It is important to improve aerospace systems' safety, reliability, maintainability, affordability, and reduce life cycle cost.

This paper constructs the HSE model with unreliable test outcomes based on the Bayes rule and proposes a method based on LRAGA to solve the HSE problem.

Many industries accomplish green innovation for sustainable development, but it should play a significant role in the sustainable development and implementation of an organizations benefit. The purpose of this paper is to examine if green business innovation in terms of technology, organization, stakeholder and policies is able to develop competitive advantages.

This study was carried out in two stages and covered 4 variables and 21 indicators. Based on the experts’ opinions and literature review, a self-administered questionnaire was distributed among 113 experts of oil refining companies in Iran. The data were analyzed by the structural equation modeling technique.

The results indicated the effects of organizational factors, legislation, regulations and technology on green innovation. They also revealed the role of green innovation in reaching competitive advantages. Moreover, the relationship between stakeholder and green innovation was investigated.

The findings provide guidance on how firms can be better prepared for green innovation and get the most out of it and deal with the risks involved in green innovation, it is important that companies evaluate organization, technology and environment readiness and formulate corresponding strategies. Such a proactive approach can help enterprise control and minimize the risks of green innovation. A self-evaluation of the green innovation readiness of an enterprise helps the enterprise establish a mechanism to keep track of technological evolution.

This study contributes to the emerging field of green innovation which embed organization, technology, stakeholders, legislation and flows of the value created, delivered and captured in a value network. It also highlights the gaps in addressing the challenges of an innovative model for competitive advantages and suggests avenues for future research.

The purpose of this paper is to extend the debate over the regulation of corporate behaviour in the area of health and safety to the question of implementing corporate social responsibility. Whereas the debate was based on the protection of workers, in particular, by health and safety regulations, the article focuses on another stakeholder; i.e. the local community which plays host to a multinational company in the extractive industry.

After an overview of the compliance versus punishment debate the paper looks at the dichotomy currently prevailing in the legislation. Using case examples this paper reviews options for improvement.

The article proposes a third approach for the protection of this group of stakeholders, i.e. the participatory approach which would allow the local community to play a role in the decision‐making processes of the company to protect their interests.

Emphasises the need to control multinational companies through international law in order to protect local communities.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a comprehensive overview of technical integrity management (TIM) and propose a methodology for assessing to which extent the technical integrity (TI) performance is balanced in terms of goal awareness among the personnel responsible for TIM, and the degree to which high level goals are implemented in maintenance strategies.

The study involved a comprehensive literature survey as well as information and data collected in the Norwegian oil and gas (O&G) industry. Several discussion rounds were carried out with the industrial maintenance management experts to recognize the existing practices and to confirm the suggested model.

The literature review indicated that there is a need for a methodology for assessing to which extent the technical integrity (TI) performance is balanced in terms of goal awareness among the personnel responsible for TIM, and the degree to which high‐level goals are implemented in maintenance strategies. The suggested model can incorporate industrial data as well as intentions, intuitions and experiences of industrial experts who are making decisions sensitive to TI of a production installation.

The study has been conducted in relation to TIM of production installations on the Norwegian Continental Shelf (NCS). The study is limited to measuring TI performance in relations to experts' awareness.

The study stresses the need for improving synergy between the TI and maintenance management function. It proposes a methodology to measure to which extent organizational priorities are balanced, while addressing financial as well as health, safety and environmental (HSE) interests when selecting a maintenance strategy.

This paper addresses a problem that is not given enough attention in the currently available literature. Available approaches suggest models and frameworks for measuring integrity performance. However, the operationalization of most of the existing models and frameworks, remains vague. Instead a formal mechanism is needed to analyze the gap between the present performance and performance targets.

This paper aims to provide a detailed case study of a corporate foresight for innovation (CFI) project done by the Higher School of Economics’ (HSE) (Moscow, Russia) corporate foresight (CF) unit for a large state-owned Russian service company. It demonstrates how CFI methods lead to recommendations and how these recommendations result in decisions.

Drawing from being part of the project team, review of the project documents and interviews, the case describes a multi-phased CFI project which incorporated several CF methods. Techniques used for the project itself included grand challenges and trend analysis, analysis of best practices through use of benchmarking and horizon scanning, interviews, expert panels, wild card and weak signals analysis, cross impact analysis, SWOT and backcasting. The project used a broad-base of secondary information, expert panels consisting of company experts and HSE CF team personnel, interviews with senior management and an extensive literature review using HSE’s propriety iFORA system.

In all 17 CFI recommendation and over 100 implementation recommendations were made; 94 per cent of the CFI recommendations were accepted with most implemented at the time this case was written. The case also identifies five enabling factors that collectively both helped the CFI project and led to a high rate of recommendation acceptance and one factor that hindered CFI project success.

The case study provides detailed information and insight that can help others in conducting CF for innovation projects and establishes a link between CF methods and innovation-based recommendations and subsequent decisions.

In-depth case studies that show academe and practitioners how CFI leads to recommendations and is linked to subsequent decisions have been identified as a gap in the literature. This paper therefore seeks to address this need by presenting a detailed CF case for a corporate innovation project.

A new High School Equivalency (HSE) policy was developed in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) in response to a shift toward a knowledge-based economy and a transformation toward STEM education. The purpose of this study is to explore and understand the stakeholders' perceptions and experiences in implementing the new HSE policy in a school that follows a US curriculum in the UAE. The study was conducted before the COVID-19 lockdown. The phenomenological approach was used to shed light on the implementation of the HSE policy in an active learning environment and the challenges facing the school's stakeholders. The study results reveal the challenges that stakeholders face in implementing the HSE policy and their experiences in offering students the courses they need. All stakeholders agreed that the transformation toward STEM education requires proper implementation of the high school equivalency policy in an active learning environment that help in developing students' twenty-first-century skills and prepare them to meet the job market needs.

Project management generally covers many important areas such as cost, quality and time in different industrial settings, but it is deficient in relation to integration of health, safety and environmental risks. Poor knowledge of project managers about HSE management necessitates the studying on the mutual effects of HSE and project management. Hence, investigating the impact of project management on health monitoring programs, safety prevention monitoring, environmental monitoring plans and finally the effectiveness of professional health monitoring programs and determining their importance are main objectives of this research. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

A model based on structural equations was designed and developed. The constructs of this model are project management, health monitoring and safety prevention monitoring program. Based on the conceptual model, some questionnaires were prepared and distributed among the experts of strategic project management.

The results of applied structural modeling suggest that project management focuses on each aspect of HSE management, including health monitoring programs, safety prevention monitoring programs, environmental monitoring plans and effectiveness of professional health monitoring programs. HSE management can also be strengthened by empowering project management. Checking fire protection systems, using appropriate techniques to identify contamination and disposal of waste and incorporating techniques for brainstorming or other ideas creation in the group are the most important tasks in HSE-enabled project management frameworks.

Since there is still no strategic alignment model that includes components of project management and HSE management, a model for achieving this goal is vital. This paper elaborates this alignment based on literature and using a field study.